Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Improved Chromatic Aberration Repair Tool

When Lightroom 4 beta was released awhile back I reviewed most of the key features over the next week. If you missed any of those just do a search in the top right corner of the website for Lightroom 4 to see all of the new bells and whistles that Adobe is adding into Lightroom 4. Today I wanted to quickly cover one really small change that might make a big impact for everyone though, the changes to the Chromatic Aberration Tool. First what is Chromatic Aberration, here is a quick definition from Wikipedia:

“chromatic aberration (CA, also called achromatism or chromatic distortion) is a type of distortion in which there is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. It occurs because lenses have a different refractive index for different wavelengths of light (the dispersion of the lens).”

Basically its a distortion along the dark and light edges of an image that show itself as a purplish haze along the edges. Here is a very cropped in detail of a beach scene in Hawaii with Palm trees off in the distance. When you zoom in on the palm trees where there is a dark line of the tree against the light of the sky you will see on the edge a color cast.

Before in Lightroom 3 there was a way to fix Chromatic Aberration in the lens correction section of the develop module. You had a slider for red/cyan and for blue/yellow and could turn a defringe filter on or off. It took a little time to get the sliders just right and with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 they have really simplified things. Adobe replaced all of the sliders with a simple Remove Chromatic Aberration checkbox in the lens correction section. Sometimes less is actually not better but in this case it actually works very well and is such a time saver I think it’s great. After using it on a bunch of images I didn’t find any problems and it got right of the Chromatic Aberration perfectly. Here is a detail of that same image with the Chromatic Aberration removed.

Pretty quick and easy and another reason I am looking forward to the upgrade of Lightroom 4. Do you have any questions on Lightroom 4 (or any Lightroom questions), leave me a comment below and lets chat!

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Mark is a fine art wedding and portrait photographer from Northern California. He has been passionate about photography since childhood and started his studio 12 years ago to bring a fresh style of photography to the wedding and portrait world.

Right now there isn’t a way since Lightroom 4 is beta. But when the real release comes out I am not sure if you will be able to merge what you had created in Lightroom 4 Beta with Lightroom 3, I think you will just have the ability to import your Lightroom 3 catalog and then start from there.

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